Neo-Victorian Freakery explores the way in which contemporary fiction, film, and television has revisited the lives of nineteenth-century freak show performers. It locates the neo-Victorian freak show as a crucial forum for debating the politics of disability, gender, sexuality and race within the genre more broadly.

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Reviews

“The current volume extends the analysis to the reappearance of Victorian freaks in contemporary fiction, plays, films, graphic novels, and television. … provides many perspectives, including her own, on the original experiences of Sarah Baartman … . Davies demonstrates that long-dead freaks still raise disturbing questions about sexuality, race, and otherness. Extensive notes. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.” (R. Sugarman, Choice, Vol. 53 (9), May, 2016)

About the author

Helen Davies is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction: Passionate Puppets (2012), and has published widely on gender and sexuality in Victorian and neo-Victorian literature.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Neo-Victorian Freakery
Book Subtitle: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show
Authors: Helen Davies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137402561
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture Collection, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-40255-4Published: 07 September 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-40256-1Published: 29 April 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VI, 239
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Fiction, Literary History

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

Front Matter

Introduction: Distorted Images and Re-membered Bodies: Constructing Neo-Victorian Freakery

Mixing (re)Memory and Desire: Constructing Sarah Baartman

Separation Anxieties: Sex, Death, and Chang and Eng Bunker

Excessively Feminine? Anna Swan, Gendering Giantesses, and the Genre of the ‘True Life Story’ Pamphlet

Innocence, Experience, and Childhood Dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren

The Strange Case of Joseph and Jack: Joseph Merrick and Spectacles of Deviance

Afterword: The Neo-Victorian Enfreakment of P. T. Barnum

Back Matter

About this book